#contemporary-anxiety

#contemporary-anxiety

David Trent, a struggling writer whose behavior steers this blackly comic thriller, exults upon learning that his new neighbor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the Pulitzer-winning novelist Silas Hale-"an echo," he initially thinks, of "Henry David Thoreau living in Ralph Waldo Emerson's backyard!" When it becomes clear that Silas has no interest in mentorship, though, David contrives to shore up his writerly status in other, increasingly reprehensible ways.